The clinical research industry is a mess that needs cleaning up

The Lancet and 'New England Journal of Medicine's retraction of a hydroxychloroquine study prompted the WHO to restart trials of the drug. — AFP Relaxnews

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief a problem that has been plaguing clinical research for decades: the unreliability of the entire clinical research “industry”.

The clinical research industry is composed of clinical researchers, medical research ethics committees, journal editors and journal peer reviewers. Together, this team is supposed to ensure that the end-user clinic doctor is given reliable research information to inform his clinical decision-making. This is referred to as evidence-based medicine. Because the end-user doctor has no access to the original data and cannot ordinarily request for further statistical tests, it falls upon this quadrumvirate to act as a quality control team. But they have repeatedly proven to be feckless and incompetent.

On June 4, we witnessed the embarrassing spectacle of two of the highest “impact factor” medical journals in the world retract a published study because of a lack of due diligence prior to publication. That is, two independent vetting systems, at the US-based New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the UK-based Lancet, had failed. To make matters worse, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had previously rushed to suspend the hydroxychloroquine arm of the ongoing Solidarity clinical trials of drugs to treat Covid-19 because the retracted study had offered data suggesting patient harm.